Is Your Content Marketing Program a Success?

Content marketing is one of the most popular strategies deployed by today's B2B marketers to attract and engage prospects, and guide them through the buying process.

But how do marketers measure content marketing success? We asked 20,000 members of the B2B Technology Marketing Community on LinkedIn what metrics they use to measure the success of their content marketing initiatives. Over 500 people responded - and here is a preview of the results.

Leads, leads, leads With 73 percent of all responses, leads are the number one metric used to gauge content marketing success. This is followed by content views and downloads with 53 percent, and inquiries with 52 percent of responses respectively (multiple selections were allowed).

No social metricsSurprisingly, the lowest responses came in for social media engagement and SEO impact. I assume this is partly due to the difficulty in precisely measuring these metrics and their intermediate rather than direct impact on pipeline results.

Who owns content marketing strategy?Another question we asked is looking to identify ownership of content marketing strategy within the organization. No surprises here: 67 percent of content marketing strategies are owned by corporate marketing, followed at a distant 41 percent for product marketing, and 20 percent for field marketing. Very few respondents rely on product management (16 percent) or external agencies (8 percent) for content strategy.

This wraps up our content marketing survey preview for today. Stay tuned for more survey results! What metrics do you use in your content marketing initiative?